The Global Commons: An Introduction. - book reviews

As I found out during my service from 1974 until, 1980 on the original Advisory Council of the US Office of Technology Assessment, the "tortoise" of social innovation always lags behind the "hare" of technological innovation. The former is suspect as planning, white even the most trivial new technologies in the private sector are hailed in media and corporate advertising as innovations or breakthroughs. Laws, treaties, and standard-setting lag even further behind today's accelerating rates of technological change.

Susan Buck sides with the tortoises, providing an excellent overview of today's proliferating issues. Buck looks at such global commons as the oceans, the atmosphere, and space from an historical, institutional, legal, and economic perspective. She summarizes the evolution of law, jurisprudence, treaties, property rights, and the growing concern over managing and allocating planetary "resources" in the industrialized world.

"After reviewing the history and structure of the global commons, do current trends point to the Grotian moment..."a time in which a fundamental change of circumstances [creates] the need for a different world structure and a different international law"?

"Compliance is affected by monitoring and enforcement. How whale harvests are monitored and what sanctions are imposed on nations that violate International Whaling Commission (IWC) directives are part of the implementation component. A recurrent criticism of both international relations and international law is that effective enforcement is virtually impossible because there is no routinized sanctioning mechanism. However, equally striking is the observation that international agreements work more often than they do not....National leaders recognize that future cooperative ventures, which may be to their advantage, may be jeopardized if they become known as unreliable international actors.... Although cooperation entails costs (especially transaction and monitoring costs), it also reduces economic uncertainty because international regimes provide predictability. Routinization is especially helpful in the global market economy because of the high transaction costs of negotiating exchange terms individually with all possible exchange partners.

"free riders People or groups who benefit from the efforts of others without bearing any of the costs.

... global commons Resource domains to which all nations have legal access, such as outer space. ... international commons Resource domains shared by several nations, such as the Mediterranean Sea and Antarctica. ...precautionary principle The normative position that when faced with scientific uncertainty about the outcome of a proposed environmental policy, the alternative that poses the least risk should be chosen. In lay terms, "Better safe than sorry."

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